Second Terrace

lent and the spring revival

Today, you might see a friend or a neighbor walking around with an odd smudge on their forehead. If you look closely, the smudge is drawn in the shape of a Cross. And then it will occur to you that today is Ash Wednesday.

The person bearing that sign of an ashen Cross had gone to church earlier. There, they had probably listened to a reading of Psalm 51. At the end of the service, they went forward, and the priest or minister marked their forehead with ash. Traditionally, the ashes were produced by burning some palms from last year’s Palm Sunday.

In the old days, the priest used to say "Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris" (that is, ”Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return”). Nowadays, “Repent, and believe the Gospel” is more likely, or “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

For Western Christians, this is the beginning of Lent. Today is exactly 46 days before Easter Sunday on April 21st.

For Eastern Orthodox Christians (like me), Lent begins next Sunday evening on March 10th: and Easter is a week later, on April 28th. We Orthodox do not do the imposition of ashes. Rather, the whole first week of Lent is given to a more demanding fast, and the beautiful, haunting (and poignant) Canon of St Andrew of Crete. In the Canon, we are called to experience, first hand, the spiritual crises and turning points of one Biblical character after another.

In any case, our Lent is about the same time and duration. And for Christians of the West and the East, Lent is a season of repentance, and a call to stronger belief and works of love.

For a lot of folk, some favorite food or luxury is given up until Easter as a sort of symbolic sacrifice. I have a friend who gives up Pepsi every Lent: this, I thought, was quirky, as I’m used to people giving up chocolate, the lottery or beer. But she explained: “I drink Pepsi every day. I don’t need it, but I really like it. I give it up for Lent, because it helps me remember what was given up for me.”

She hit the nail squarely on the head. Lent is just for that: remembrance, in the deepest meaning of the term.

I grew up in a revivalist church, and I mean that literally. Fifty years ago, I went to one-week or two-week-long revivals every Spring and every Fall. Each evening service started at 7 pm and ended up at 9 or thereafter. There would be special music every night (my favorites were the blue grass gospel bands), and the preaching would last for about an hour (at least, that’s how I saw it).

The aim of all these services was indeed to revive, to deepen one’s faith, to strengthen one’s commitment. This was the goal of revivals, church camp, youth rallies, missionary conventions, Billy Graham Crusades — I went to all these things.

Obviously, I don’t attend the revivalist church of my youth anymore, but some things haven’t changed, like the whole idea of “revival.”

Lent is Revival — seven whole weeks of it. If you think about it this way, it doesn’t seem so odd or exotic.

In the Orthodox tradition that I’m part of, much emphasis in Lent is put upon fasting, prayer, generosity, and work for love. The fasting probably gets more focus than it should. The entire aim of fasting is a lot simpler and more positive than is usually thought. Fasting has nothing to do with self-punishment. It has everything to do with trying to eat (and consume in general) more simply, and retreating (as best as one can) from the clamor of a frenetic, conflicted world. Many people have found that following, at least for a short few weeks, a clean and — dare I say it — meatless diet has an amazing effect on clarity of thought and management of emotion: especially if one fasts from the constant feed of the digital world.

There’s lot of prayer in Lent, as one might expect. There are more services in church. Traditionally, private devotions at home are expanded. Some of my friends read through the entire book of Psalms every week in Lent. Others take long walks, or spend an hour in complete silence, every Lenten day. Anyone can join in on this: there are many, many Lenten resources from various religious traditions — Protestant (including mainline, evangelical and charismatic); Episcopalian; Roman Catholic; and, of course, Eastern Orthodox.

Generosity (or almsgiving) really ought to get more attention (and observance) than fasting. Generosity takes the form of giving money to good causes and to people in need (this sort of personal and direct charity is the most important). But it can also take the form of giving time and self to the lonely, the friendless, the isolated. Generosity of self means peacemaking, forgiveness, patience and forbearance, having the courage to make things right. Charity is done anonymously: after all, “But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6.3). Probably shouldn’t take pictures or expect thank you notes.

Work for the sake of love. A wizened old long-bearded monk once told me, in his dapper English accent, “If Christianity doesn’t produce love, then whatever it was wasn’t Christianity in the first place.” The whole idea of Lent is rather pragmatic: fasting, attending church, being generous — these actions are worthwhile only if they are means to an end (i.e., greater love for God and others).

In fact, it shouldn’t even be obvious if you and I are fasting: Someone Famous once let on that when one is fasting, one should go around looking normal. One should not broadcast their religiosity to the world by looking as though they’d been sucking lemons all their life.

I don’t look upon Lent as a heavy, brooding time. For my part, Lent is undetachable from Spring. Things get green again. The sun is warmer, the sky is brighter. Flowers strew their crimsons and azures, their golden white through the gardens.

The season of Lent is like when the night is breaking and almost done: the entire landscape (both within and without) is getting ready for the rising of the sun.

forgiveness is not arbitrary

-- the greater snow goose (now winging its way to northern habitats
from wintering grounds in the Carolina lowlands), photo by Josée Dumas
for the Canadian Wildlife Federation

When dealing with the problem of sin, why couldn't God snap His fingers and make the problem go away? Or just say, "Forget about it, let's let bygones be bygones"?

Truth be told, that sort of "forgiveness" is what takes place frequently on Forgiveness Sunday. On that day in many congregations, people will line up and ritually bow to each other, say something like "Forgive me, a sinner," then embrace. 

This is a beautiful, poignant custom. A person may work hard to make each statement meaningful, and enter wholeheartedly into every clasp of arms and shoulders, every breach of the usual boundaries of "personal space." Or he may not. But even if insincerity is present at all during these symbolic actions of reconciliations, it remains true that the ritual of forgiveness at the beginning of the Great Fast is more than harmless: it forces -- as do all poignant ceremonies of truth -- a person to set aside her familiar ways of comfortable society, and to step into the wide space of perilous heaven.

Nevertheless, when humans say they forgive, the mere saying of it is often the best they can do. That is the plain reason why they have to say it over and over again. The genius of language makes clear this problem: "I forgive, but I cannot forget." That phrase may be sincere, but it also reveals an ironic truth: "As long as I remember the sin, I am called to forgive ... over and over again." As long as a person lives in this time and space, forgiveness requires the repetition of the kind about which we know in liturgy: at every repeated phrase, the meaning becomes deeper and more intense, connected with more meanings.

The same is true -- perhaps more so -- with forgiveness. Perhaps the precise reason for repetition in liturgy and poetic Scripture (particularly the Psalms) is to remind us -- as a luminous sign -- that the forgiveness of a single sin is a work of a lifetime. The phrase "Lord have mercy" is the most frequently repeated phrase in the services of liturgical communities. Instead of asking "Why so often?," one should rather ask "What does this repetition mean?" "What does 'mercy' mean and why is it so important that it is so often said?"

The answer is plain. "Lord have mercy" is repeated so often because so often forgiveness must be done. That is true of humans: we can forgive, but we cannot forget. Forgiveness is not something that we can accomplish in a moment, as a whim. Mercy is not a shrugging of shoulders, a dismissal of charges, and a nonchalant "forget about it."

Forgiveness, for humans, is hard work.

It is also hard work for God.

There is nothing "fallen" about work or hard work. "Work" and "miracle" are not opposites. All of Creation is permeated and upheld by grace, and it is all personal. God's grace, or energy, is not at all a field: it is all personally articulated by Him (yes, through His angels, but His hierarchy of providence is not one of distance but of infinite presence).

Creation is already work for God. No miracle is performed at a distance. Especially the work of forgiveness.

All forgiveness is precisely personal creation and divine self-sacrifice. Forgiveness is motivated only by love, by free desire, never by need, never required by reckoning  

Sin is the rejection of the very basis of reality. It corrupts creation as a parasite: it has no reality of its own.

Yes it is a transgression. Yes sin is a debt. Yes it is a violation.

But it is, first and finally, a refusal to give away self, and an attempt to close off the heart from the symphony of the infinite hierarchy of Love.

Only an infinite self-sacrifice of the Divine Self could heal the rift in so deep a corruption, a corruption that started the disaster of Eden and gaped open wide in a bad infinity (actually, indefinite-ness). Only to be infinitely surmounted by the Cross.

Yes, forgiveness is hard work for God. No mercy could be created by a snap of Jove's fingers: instead, mercy could only come by the infinite extremity of the Cross.

There is no other possibility. There is no alternate narrative.

And my forgiveness of you, and your forgiveness of me, is real only insofar as it participates in the Cross.

Because forgiveness, for God and you and me, is only and always the pouring out of self and the crucial sacrifice of ego. This is the requirement of life from the beginning. To proclaim this and to live this is the main and only business of the church: everything else is second place. God forgives, and for you and me to be like Him, we must forgive -- like Him.

It is His character. It is His Name. We bear His Name insofar as we forgive.

God does not forget. That, you must know, is an impossibility. He doesn't need to forget in order to love.

And you will never forget either, but you don't have to. Joy in heaven does not depend on forgetfulness  

God forgives, thank God, because the Cross is infinite in range, and exceeds the pathogen of sin. Believe, and participate.

I hope you and I can live up to the Cross, because that is what we should mean when we say, "I forgive, and God forgives. Pray for me, a sinner."

Lenten Questions, No. 12: on Who is at the door (annotated)

Q: Who’s there?

A: Knock knock

Here comes everybody.(1)

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. … The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner- ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.(2)

Sylvia Plath once read this, and there you go.(3)

I tied my best to all the pretty things on glistering soulstrings, at the toy fair of my plastic prurience. Now, it is scattered like so many lost pieces of silver in a house of too many rooms and too much spoil, each corner a filthy cave concealing decay for four days, a stench by now, and loss, disarray. The house is fetid, a grimy shrine of tawdry chotsky, faded macramé, phosphor images of airbrushed nipped and tucked erotigods, and concrete lawn ornaments left cobwebbed in the oil stained garage.(4)

I lost my mind after Eden. This is what I hear:

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag –
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’
‘With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
‘What shall we ever do?’(5)

The City is everywhere and the world. Once, families were rooted in earth and village, church and grave. But old ladies buy their gravy at WalMart, men watch the View and get persuaded by executive candidates pandering legislative eschatology, children have no room for Heaven, only outer space.

At the flaming sword, the lights went out. At the Tower, thought fragmented into opinions. Language lost its grip on Adam’s names in Konigsberg. And Sigmund dissected me into “ought me,” “what me,” and “naught me,” and there’s no responsible me anymore. And Jacques sucked the letters out of words.(6)

Poets are, necessarily, symbolists, for manly do they gather sense into the remnants of sentence, the splintered light of what once was, and what will be:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.(7)

Man is moldering in my dirty garage, and art is my concrete statuary of kitsch. My thoughts are dusty on my knickknack shelf, and I pray for boredom to save me from the storm tonight.

I only visit everywhere, since I live in the City of the world. I do not belong, since I want and want. I do not believe, because I can not know. Anything. Anyone.

I work, not for salvation, but for pleasantness in Sun City, where I will be cremated without even knowing it, after a long rehearsal for the consciousness of shadow. That is my heaven, where I can watch Love Boat all day, keeping tomorrow at bay.

I do not know, because I cannot think.

Someone needs to come and do what needs to be done, for once. All we Adams have gone astray, each to our own way. There must needs be Adam again, to speak and do, as one, again. To will and act, again, as one.(8)

I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There's where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thous- endsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the (9)

I don’t know Who’s there. I should know, but I don’t know, because I don’t know who I am that I am. I am tangled, shattered, broken sentences. The way is shut, the

Knock. Knock.

It's that Saturday.(10) You died, but as happens so often, you couldn't tell the difference. It's the way of decadence, a constant rehearsal of cultural perdition, that unnaturally (but normally) habituates a person to the atmosphere of Hades, that renders difference into "differance." How embarrassing it must be, to die, and not even know it.

But He, at the Door, is the difference.(11)

Notes:

1) one of the meanings of "HCE," which is also signifies Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the second central character of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

2) the opening lines of Finnegan's Wake.

3) in her semi-autobiographical work The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath associates the mental breakdown of her protagonist with the reading of Finnegan's Wake. The book, which ends with the words "I stepped into the room," was published a month before Plath was found lying on her gas oven door, wet towels and dishrags stuffed in the threshold cracks to protect her children from her own morbidity.

4) the attachment of the heart (i.e., the nous) to the created instead of the Creator produces the fragmentation of consciousness, and the corrosion of the mind (which, in turn, is reflected in cultural decadence). Secondly, no one really knows much about "tombs" anymore, especially those of the newly-hewn stone variety. But we all know about dank garages.

5) lines 128-134 of The Wasteland, by (of course) T. S. Eliot.

6) i.e., Eden, Babel, Kant, Freud, Derrida.

7) lines 3-11 of the fifth section of "East Coker," in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which is a curious drink of water in the badlands, and an odd setting of the Cross.

8) Romans 5.18-21.

9) the final words of Finnegan's Wake. Please note that the last sentence is completed by the fragment at the beginning. It is meant to suggest a circularity (i.e., "closed self-referential loop") of reality, which is the usual, and ultimate, accomplishment of consciousness in the darkness.

(10) Holy Saturday: the descent of Christ into Hades, when He broke the gates of brass.

(11) i.e., Christ is the "difference," most assuredly not "differance."

Lenten Questions, No. 11: on the City

Q: What is a City?

A: A City is whatever is not Country. A Country is visited, but rarely lived in. A visitor romanticizes scenery, place, and rhapsodizes on the elegance of being displaced, pleasantly, out of the obvious City, but placed as bourgeois in bivouacs that complain of offal smells.

There is little such romance in the Country. The plainness and hardness of wind and dirt, heat and cold rain, anvil clouds from the darkening west and hail and jagged magnesium fire that leaps at the caprice of chaos and terror -- these all offend suburban sentiment. Sentiment, or kitsch, preens and visits through imagined lyrics. It drives on scenic routes in a minivan on a pleasant afternoon. It is nice, and it may even be good for the City, but it is not the Country.

A countryman feels dirt as the ground of rocks, the veil of springs, and the mysterious substance of growing things. Water he knows as the old testament was conscious of God: flooding terror whose absence shrivels life, but whose presence also cleanses the decrepit old August dust, whose snowmelt inaugurates the transmutation of the third day. His mind has joined with his bride, for there is only marriage in the Christian fields and forests of the Law. Together, and only together, they recognize the Word of Creation, and they see symbol in the holy earth.

Symbol reaches deeper than occasional sentiment into the ground, wider toward the sea, higher to the rulers of day and night. The sky is eternity and glory is the sun, secret moon and wilder loveliness. Flowers are his helpmeet and goddess, and in their petals are pirouetting ghosts, pas de deux, of ritual union and gladness. Water is beyond mathematics and chemical equations: it was primordial chaos, but the Dove whispered, fluttering wings upon the void in the silence before the Word: now it echoes sea and rain, storm and brook, springs in the desert calling forth the rose, quenching thirst.

The wind is constant anamnesis. Tomorrow and tomorrow, and all our yesterdays, are buoyed like flotsam on the pneumatic tide: time is cargoed on coruscations of cloud and wind. The scent of timothy in the sun, the moldering forest floor, the ploughshared earth and the honeysuckle banks and lilacs in April, apples and the rhapsody of scarlet gold in autumnal glory, the hearthfires seasoning the slate roof of November, and the clean violet snows of deep winter dusk: these all, on wing, carry faces and words and promised worlds, gleams of Trinitarian loves, wonders of Grace and friends, pain and Cross and loss.

The Country calls for poetry. It is only a modern conceit to try poetry in the City. But the City (not Pittsburgh, not place but psychic locale) is the torrid zone of passion, ignored substance, fogged light and a mist of forgetfulness, manufactured narrative and misplaced myth, lost like keys on a busy morning. Poetry is not written in the City: there are only intimations, trials, engineering of morphemes, forlorn alchemic experiments on fragmented minds.

Law is denied, defied ... thus epistemological night, schizophrenic Babel.

The City, today, is everywhere, signed as the old Jerusalem of abrogation. The Country has dimmed like Faerie.

On Palm Sunday, the Word of God is entering the City.

He is traversing it to ascend the Skull, in whose shadow the City wanes in curses.

The Cross is fixed on the Skull.

At the End, it is significant that Jerusalem, the City, will be made New.

Lenten Questions, No. 10: on Blasphemy

Q: What is blasphemy?

A: Saying, humanly speaking, any of the following:

"I am what I am."

For an extended comment on this line, especially if you disagree, click here for More on Blasphemy.

"It is what it is."

"I tell it like it is."

"Whatever."

"God really messed up. This is God's fault. Inshallah."

"That's your problem."

"What can I do?" or it's cognate "What can you do?"

-- to be accompanied with the ritual shrugging of shoulders, about the only secular liturgical gesture there is -- a physical devotion, if you will, to the abyss of totality, or the nihilist horizon

"Oh well."

-- ditto

"Oh well, that's just me."

-- who else can it be, pray tell?

"I speak my mind."

"I say what I want."

-- note the opportunistic ambiguity that conflates the two possible connotations: "I say whatever is passing for thought in my cerebral apparatus," or "I am committed to the expression of my wants, and I have substituted my true logos and telos with the acquisition of my demands ... I have become a Ferengi in my soul"

"My feelings are important."

"Me time."

"Celibacy is the cause of scandal."

-- celibacy, by definition, cannot ever be the cause of pedophilia: there are other reasons, but not celibacy, and female ordination will not help, either.

"Chastity is impossible. Asceticism is impossible. Effectuality and righteousness and sacrament are all unrelated. Prayer is just, you know, an intrapsychic epiphenomenon within a closed biological and predictable system."

-- what matters today is not atheism so much, nor immorality, nor wahhabist sharia, nor even globalized idiot quotidianism: what matters today is today's complete renunciation of Christian prayer -- for prayer is, after all, predicated on the union of the Divine nature with the human, the intersection of eternal predestination with psychic freedom: if there is no prayer, there is no remembrance of the Incarnation, and the spirit of antichrist will coalesce into identity and cultural power: "When the Son of Man returns, will He find faith?"

"We need progressive religion. We need church to meet our felt needs."

-- the single greatest heretical challenge against apostolic, Nicene Christianity. It is the slogan for the establishment of autonomy in opposition to ecclesial authority.

"We all worship the same God."

-- uh, no, we don't.

"We all worship."

-- uh, no, we don't.

"I feel that ..."

-- the conflation of feeling and thinking is one of the great strategic triumphs of the dark age.

"I am entitled to my opinion."

-- well, yes, but what of it? The road to hell is NOT paved with good intentions, because goodness is never oriented to hell, or present in hell. Dr. Samuel Johnson (blessed be he) and St. Bernard are wrong in saying so, because hell admits no goodness, not even in mere intentional form.

Hell, rather, is paved with opinions, and the "road to hell" (i.e., its rehearsal in history and eschatological anticipation) is asphalted black with opinion. The devil started his comet-like career with opinion, not good intention. Heresy starts with opinion. Liberal Christianity starts with opinion, not reality or vision. Materialism (capitalism and marxism) starts with a blinkered, prejudiced and jaundiced opinion that excludes all metaphysics.

So yes, you can have your opinion, and you're welcome to it. But heaven doesn't rejoice at your having an opinion. Even rocks and snails have an opinions, but they are not too interesting (although they would probably get a lot of votes). Human nature, though, ought to gain knowledge of reality that stretches beyond perception. When examined in the light of day, opinion is of a rather lower, more pedestrian, quality. The freedom to foster opinions is like saying, "Yes, Adam, you can sin, but it sure as hell isn't good for you." But to know the truth, the gospel truth -- as opposed to mainline opinion -- is to be set free.

"Christianity [in its acceptable form] already has a cosmic embrace, and already in some way includes all people, merely earnest in Spirit, and not one merely parochial in context ... Christianity of the more parochial kind has perpetrated in its own name many destructive abuses."

-- from a particularly rancid translator's preface to an otherwise wonderful Orthodox tome on theology

"Christianity is not exclusively true, therefore there is no salvation because there is no need for it, therefore there is no sin, therefore there was no Cross. Well, yes, maybe an execution, but no intersection of vision with history, of the philosophical with the mystical, of the revelation of the Trinity and the fellowship of the single Theanthropos."

-- the episteme, or meta-narrative, of the powers-that-be, the Tower

"The Cross is a political denunciation ... the Resurrection is really a vision/halluncination of a new order. It was necessary for Pilate to crucify Jesus, if, that is, there ever was a Jesus."

-- from the gents at the Jesus Seminar

"I think, therefore I am."

"There is no blasphemy."

Lenten Questions, No. 9: on the usefulness of the Cross

Q: What changed with the Cross?

Nothing has changed in the world. The sun rises hot, the winds blow. Little people die little deaths. Storms blow in from the abysmal sea. Tempest, headache. The smog of hades, the king in tattered yellow haunts, lost Carcosa, no mask! No mask! Honesty is schizophrenia.

What changed with the Cross?

Today is the same as Good Friday, and every day, in the dusty thorn, outside the gate, outside the gate, and somewhere the leaves of Paradise whisper in the breeze, and I long for the completed days, the fullness of light, the healing leaves, the coolness of the evening walk of the Triune Friend, the Person of Infinity, Beauty of Distance, Difference of Peace.

What changed with the Cross?

They still die, the young, the innocent, the poor and the marginal, the people of the land. They are still consumed by the machines of cold advantage. There was an evening, I remember, when the leaves sang, when the trees whispered the same song of the surf, and the creatures I named were friends, and she and I walked in perfection, becoming likeness, and His smile radiant beyond the sun. How we walked in the gloaming breezes, the greenness of our dawn, when breathed the hills and the springs joined the stars, bejeweling the earth.

Gone, gone, broken and down, darkened my soul cannot carry them, I have become stooped and frail, closed, autistic, gone, torn away the sense of my friends, the fellowship with the small, I cannot carry them, I cannot save them, I cannot bring them, I cannot bring her, I cannot save her, I cannot save me, and them, and all the days until Good Friday.

What changed with the Cross?

They die, they grieve, they the poor, and the benighted rich, the blinded by the god of this age, who has not done so well with welfare, with healthcare, with environmental protection and wealth redistribution, with his campaign promises and Miltonian romantic revolution, the damn fool and liar, angel that he is.

What changed with the Cross?

What was the world like on Saturday morning? In the twentieth century, more blood was shed in the name of freedom and democracy than any other, and there was no religious crusade. They starved, they wasted in plague and disaster. The children cried and whimpered in the hungry night, swollen with bilharzia, kwashiorkor, flies congregating, church for Beelzebub. Globalization will help them, the hungry children, will it not? GATT, WTO, UNICEF, EU? The fancy internet, while we trumpet our transgressive libertinism? We are so chic, so dressed, so like the cows of Bashan. So painted, so plastic, so sung to, so entertained, so coddled, so swathed and anointed, so protected from the news that the powers are coming, are speaking, are uttering, so stoned.

What changed with the Cross?

He comes, once again in the afternoon, once again asking where, where are you in the leaves, in the thicket, in the shadows. Hearing nothing, but the murmurs of shades, He climbs the Tree, like Zaccheus, and He is lifted up, lifted up, outside the gate, outside the gate, so that He will draw all men, like the sign of Moses in the Wilderness of Sin. He is the first to obey, to fulfill, the first to be, the first to love, the first to save, the past, the present, time past in time present and all the possible days, the Ancient of Days.

He comes again, in the Good Friday afternoon, let down by the first Adam, failure and sinner. I didn’t show up either. Neither did you.

A: You live in a mirror. Step out. Use the Cross to break the glass. You know, where it says, “In Case of Emergency.” Break the glass. You are not in wonderland.

Lenten Questions, No. 8: on Truth

Q: What is Truth?

A: The Answer stands before anyone who asks. Sometimes, He doesn’t make a sound, because the language has denied the very possibility of a word, much less the Word. Language is the participation of a soul with the logos of Creation, so it makes sense that the Son of God is the Word of God. But sometimes, in a darkened world, language refuses participation, and makes no sense, and the Word remains silent.

The Word is silent today: the oracles have shut down. Will the globe get warmer? Silence. Will China take over? Silence. Who should we vote for? Silence. Should church leaders make up and get along? Silence. Should we try them and arrest them, and go over their accounting? Silence. Should we play the tsar again, or should we wander into gray old Europe and repeat, with Otto’s grandchildren, that truth is just, you know, nice? Silence. Should we prove how social-minded we are and get our pictures in the paper building houses, presenting checks, thumping chests? Silence. Should we invade Iran? Pakistan? Silence. Should we embrace ID or disavow it? Should we plunge a human nucleus in a bovine embryo? Should we say that a man is pregnant?

Silence. Silence. Silence.

The Answer does not speak, because the inquisitors are not interested in answers. They are engaged, merely, in the mean business of measuring the correspondence of this new philosophy with their own supreme opinions. They want to feel esteemed, significant, approved, greeted in the marketplace, set down at the right place at the banquets. They want their degrees noted, achievements catalogued, autographs sought, royalties paid, and appearances on the news. Jesus is so fundamental, so extraordinarily insufferably inconvenient, so inexpedient. So disposable.

The Answer is Truth, and the silence of Truth indicts the plastic falsity of the Age. The Word of God is silent, He speaks but we cannot hear, for we do not see Creation in the world. We have exchanged beauty for probability. We have given up meaning in favor of worldview. We have traded salvation for therapy, reality for virtuality, natural law for consensus. We have sold the Gospel for the New World Order, for thirty pieces of silver.

No, Jesus does not speak to us. We are Cross-eyed like Pilate, flummoxed, because after all we don’t need saved anymore. What is perdition? What is sin? What is beauty, right and good? What is wrong? What is truth?

Truth is the Answer, but it sounds, today, like 42.

Silence. We have forgotten the question, and the whole of life is a computation.

Silence, the Answer seems meaningless. Until we break our mind open, and walk out into the cold bright morning, the zero summer, into the death of repetitions and somnolent phrases, the cessation of ambient noise, the aging of perpetual adolescence and the shaming of geriatric mainline complaint and smugness, the discovery of hard roaring and infinite beauty that consumes, like fire, the idols of Hegel’s reveries.

Rise up, sleeper, arise from the dead, and the light of Christ will shine upon you.

He is the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free.

He is the Answer, but inquiries are taken only at the foot of the Cross. The unfortunate, maddening plight of Christian intellectuals and cultural effetes is this simple thing: all philosophy is cruciform, and all theology demands repentance.

Christians may not speak in the cultured symposium unless they carry, on their shoulders, the fundamentalistic, close-minded, parochial, irrelevant, patriarchal and hackneyed Cross. If Plato and Dewey still want to carry on a conversation, in the shadow of this offense, then fine, we have much to talk about. Many sentences to complete. Much theory to fix. More thought to heal.

But Plato and Dewey are usually too much offended, and only the poor, the halt, the blind and the accused are left behind in the dust. They do not read the papers and are never mentioned. The banquets are not for them. They do not wear purple, and the only gold they know is what gleams from the sun, in the gloaming west. They are tired of opinions and self-esteem, for these do not save. They do not read narratives. They do not entertain themselves with self-consciousness. They do not need self-discovery. They know enough of this. They know enough to be scared to death of death, and they have the guts to admit it. They are not fooled by the opiates of chic and celebrity, the virtual cradle that lulls fat nurseries to sleep.

The poor see death tomorrow, better than you or I. They are honest enough to be frightened. You and I are swaddled by our opinions.

They hear the silence. You and I hear it at the end of the day, when theories do not save us from our nightmares, when we remember that many great composers and artists were unhappy men, who could not string the beauty of their work into their everyday. That, too, is silence in the middle of the human night, the death of plastic angels.

After the silence, truth is there, only for sinners. The Word is silent to all pretense, and He is a cipher to all pretending. He speaks, though, to the sick who need a Physician, to the blind who want the Light. He teaches those who don’t mind being called ignorant. He heals those who are brave enough to look at their putrefaction.

And most of all, He saves those who need saved. He is Truth only to sinners, because they know that God, and Truth, is not knowable except through the Cross.

Or, to put it another way, cruciform philosophy, penitential theology.

There is no other way to tell the truth.

Lenten Questions, No. 7: on the Price of the Soul

Q: What is the whole world gained at the price of a soul?

A: The whole world is always being gained at this price. If one offers his soul, then he probably will get the whole world. People are getting precisely what they want more often than they would care to admit. They are disappointed, sure, and even depressed. But this disappointment is not produced by the failure to get the goods. It is, rather, produced by the discovery of that was gotten turned out to be plastic, steroid and hormone puffed, cybernetic, gauche and philistine. The whole world, shrink-wrapped, is not enough.

But that is not the main problem. It turns out that souls, today, are not held out for the price of the world, but are offered at discount instead. Ten percent off. Twenty-five percent off. Half off. Clearance. Going-out-of-business sale. Fire sale.

Face it. Today, souls are not sold for the price of the world. We’re selling our souls for cheap.

That is hard to believe, and I readily admit it. Yet, it remains the only motive behind the following speeches. (If one truly valued his soul, he would wonder that Christ requires so little.)

“Fasting is inconvenient.”

(It would be more honest to say “Fasting is hard,” and if you said that, you and I are friends, because we enjoy conviviality and the glories of roast beef and feasting, magic stories and jokes that improve with the retelling, smoky inns where the hearth is the only light cast on stone and oak. It is hard to give up this for a while, but it is good, for the good of our souls, for the sake our Our Lord Who became failure and accepted the aggregated projection of despair of all man's time. Don't you think so? that we can close the taverna for a short while, out of respect, silence, and praise?)

“Confession, private confession, is too intimate, and I would rather transmute my confession into a pastoral counseling session, so that I will push out the silence with the static of my free associations and my complaints. Better this than approach that offensive, scandalous and frightening position statement of ‘I have sinned against heaven and against Thee.’”

(In confession we do not rationalize, justify, distribute the blame. We do not confess the sins of other people. We do not diagnose ourselves with psychobabbularity. We do not embed accusations and grudges in explanations. In America, we have confused confession with pastoral counsel and spiritual direction: all are good, but they are not the same.)

“Liturgy is too long. Vespers and Pre-Sanctified are too dark. I want something upbeat, something that boosts my self-esteem. I want to be inspired, encouraged for success. I want to be cheered up.”

(Preaching must be first dogmatic, and only secondarily expositional. We have put too much faith in exegesis alone, and the "simple reading of the text." We have put too much faith in excitement and crowds. We have allowed "motivation" to seep, like effluvia, into the precincts of the nave. "Motivation" is nothing more than the caress of pride and an appeal to self. Liturgy, given the signs of the times, is probably not nearly long enough.)

“I want to be modern, to be academically respected. I want to modify my catechism to admit a more fashionable cosmology. I want Tielhard instead of Basil. I want my MTV … no, scratch that, I want my Ph.D.”

(How many people have diminished their faith because academic culture has required this sacrifice?)

“I want mysticism, but I don’t want to work hard at doctrine. I want candles and incense, but not order. I want to wear Orthodoxy as a Rodeo Drive new suit, a boutique experience, but I don’t want an ugly cross reaving my heart.”

(Some converts are still protestant, still protesting, still reforming, still insisting.)

“Religion is what I make of it in my own unkempt house of disappointment. I don’t need the Church tell me what to do, what to believe, how to pray. I don’t need other people. Even though I’m miserable by myself, I choose my self instead."

(There is no such thing as private Orthodoxy.)

“The mirror is so pretty, such a pity it is hard as glass.”

A mirror is a only bauble, but many will gladly take it in exchange for their soul. For the Devil has made of it the whole world to them, a reverse shadow of Creation, declining into endless virtuality: this is the bait and switch game of all time. It wasn’t an apple at the Garden of Eden. It was a looking glass.

The reflecting idol, the abomination of desolation, demands a certain price to enter its glass embrace:

"What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but, in the getting, lose his soul?"

Lenten Questions, No. 6: on Silence

Q: What is silence?

A: Silence is when you no longer hear the Word, the Word wrapped in a ritual of despair splayed up on a dead tree by the miserable potty-waste of a cardboard State, which only understands bodies, dead or alive. ¿Le gusta este jardín, que es suyo? ¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!

The Word was with God, but the world knew Him not, the Word that through Him God made the world and for Him, too. And despite the worldly intentions, notwithstanding, a Word of singularity, freedom, with infinity collapsed, as it were, on the head of pin in a moment, the Son harrowing the hell out of Hell.

Rejection ... "knowing not." What happens when sound is divorced from meaning, sight from vision, experience from Law, consciousness from Light? Then the Word is spoken but simply not heard. Take everything away from man, everything, destroy everything, silence the music, squash the light into one bare speck, one candle flame in the stadium of stygian night.

Silence is the black hole, across the blue event horizon. The dead tree is straining, the sun is blank, ghastly. The moon has shrouded herself in pall.

What will you do now, now that you have the last word? Do you have anything to say? Any word, without the Word?

I didn’t think so.

That, is silence.

No se puede vivir sin amar.

Lenten Questions, No. 5: on Afternoons

Q: When is an afternoon?

A: The afternoon is when the morning is old, and it can be pleasant. Those are the afternoons of the sun on shore, or the dappled sun on timothy and clover, or the sun like white gold in a glory above the green bower of the trees on a hobbit’s walk you take under the forest eaves. Those pleasant afternoons are latter rains washed up on a freshening breeze, rinsing the dust out of the air, even the ozone crack of an anvil cloud drenching the land in the exultation of titans, "angels of rain and lightning." Those, too, are the more frequent afternoons, of still warmth, diffuse sun in a sky becalmed, where time remembers that it sails under the age, and then again, under the everlasting, when nothing happens much except the Word.

But there are other afternoons when the morning dies. The light, while on, is wan and bleached, the heat desiccates, a heat without warmth, a mottled, blearing sky, illumination enough for blasphemy. Such afternoons are the appointments of Apollo letting fly his arrows of plague, when the leprous doom arches into the human genome. Distant bells toll in the fetid dust. A dead tree is erected, with an offering of despair.

Some afternoons cry out for the night to end them, for the earth to quake to fend them away.

Thank heaven, there will come a Morning.